When Oleg was a student in Moscow, he got to know an underground religious organization. One day Oleg heard from his friend about a religious sermon to be held outside of Moscow at 11 pm. Oleg took an electric train, which was empty, to get there. When he arrived, the church was already full of people and the sermon continued until 5 am. After the sermon a woman who was in the audience offered Oleg a key to her house, for it was too early for the trains to start running. The woman herself went to work. In the Soviet period religious people trusted each other. Being religious was like belonging to a brotherhood. Oleg also relays a story about divination with stones that he heard from his female friend. This story happened in the 1930s. She was a daughter of a wealthy farmer. One of the workers in the farm was a strange man. He neither smoked nor drank, but always went somewhere to hide. One day the worker went to a cow shelter. She followed him. In the shelter the man pulled out a small bag with stones and began doing divination. This was a time when monks were repressed and religion banned. It turned out that the man had been a monk, ran away and ended up working on that farm. She asked him to do a divination for her. Although the farm was on the rise and prosperous, the former monk advised that her family should give up their farm, for they soon would lose it all and live in a remote place between the earth and the sky. She did not believe him. But not long after, her family was arrested as kulaks and sent to Siberia. They indeed ended up living inside an earth shelter on the top of a hill. Oleg says that he himself only witnessed divination using a sheep’s blade bone. The bone is smoked on both sides and the diviner reads signs on the cracks. Finally, Oleg recalls that when he was a student and lived in a dormitory, one of his neighbors was keen on reading people’s hands and faces. Soon Oleg himself became interested in this kind of divination. He spent a lot of time alone, reading books. This helped him to understand people better and keep away from the bad ones. As a result, he spent New Year alone, trying to keep away from bad people. Soon a realization dawned on him that there is no such thing as ‘normal people’. In order not to end up a lonely person, he decided to give up divination. The ability to foretell only brings suffering. It is a punishment for diviners. There is a saying: ‘By adding to your knowledge, you also add to your sorrows’.